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A question for Tim Pawlenty at the next Republican debate.
“When you became governor in 2003, Minnesota had under 395,000 citizens without health insurance. In 2008, the last year before the recession struck, Minnesota had 446,000 citizens without health insurance. Do you regard that as an important failure of your administration? If not, why not?”
Ouch!
Then again – can anyone name any potential Republican presidential candidate (besides Romney) who has done anything, anything at all, to cover more people by health insurance? Let’s face it – that hasn’t been a high priority for most Republicans. The best they have come up with are lame “health savings accounts” for upper-income people,
Meanwhile in the real world, Joe Lunchbucket isn’t usually doing much tax planning. He’s more likely to be occupied with putting food on his family.
Um, in the next Republican debate? Seriously? No Republican cares about that sort of thing.
As long as his answer involves support for “freedom,” reducing government revenues, and opposition to “big government,” his home state could have no one with health insurance and it wouldn’t bother the GOP base of Tea People.
We gave people the freedom to choose how to spend their hard earned dollars. Many decided that they didn’t want health insurance. I firmly believe it’s not the place of government to force insurance down people’s throats or tell them how to spend their money.
That was easy. Makes no sense, but it’s easy.
The more I read responses or comments like that above, the more I believe that company paid & subsidized health care insurance and delivery system payments must be eliminated. I mean why should companies “socialize” medical care – insurance – for their employees? Why should companies be “slaves” to their employees health care cost needs?
I suspect that too many of the people who speak like Foosion have never had to deal with the full cost of health care. If they did, they wouldn’t be so cavalier towards those who have to buy insurance and pay the full cost of the delivery system on their own without being subsidized by a company.
The answer to the headline, is No, because he doesn’t have to… In the current GOP, health care is a privilege not a right.
actually Orrin Hatch expanded S-Chip and he ran for President, of course this was when Hatch had integrity, now he is flailing about trying to protect himself against teabaggers in his state and would run down kindergartners with a lawn mower if it would win him votes. Sad really.
foosion, so if there is an accident on the highway and your child was brought into a hospital but didn’t have any identification, you would be in favor of the hospital not treating him because they were not sure he could pay?
Republicans are the ones who came up the the mandate, because insurance companies and hospitals have every good reason to be tired of paying for free riders.
Frumplestiltskin, I think foosion was kidding. Actually his last line was the key to his wit:
That was easy. Makes no sense, but it’s easy.
saladdin, yeah. I see that, at first I read it wrong as in it makes no sense (to make people buy insurance) but the but contradicts that so my bad.
because insurance companies and hospitals have every good reason to be tired of paying for free riders.
Hospitals and insurance companies don’t pay for free riders. The insured do.
In fact, why American companies that supply health insurance to their employees seem fine with subsidizing free riders is one of the great mysteries I’ve encountered.
“Hospitals and insurance companies don’t pay for free riders. The insured do.”
Bingo. This is one of the most important empirical facts related to the healthcare debate. And a large percentage of the voting public is completely unaware of this connection.
The rise in the uninsured should be embraced by Pawlenty – it shows the Free Market at work – if you don’t have the job or the money you don’t get the insurance. Palwenty should just tell America what the Far Right truly believes – if you can’t afford health care its your own damn fault for not working hard enough.
But I suspect Pawelnty won’t have the guts to take a real Free Market position and will bore us to death with some speech that goes on and on.
And it is pathetic that Romney can’t stand up and say that he did his best to help people who needed insurance and he is not sorry about that.
In 5 years as governor, I have to wonder what happened that the uninsured rate went from 395,000 to 446,000. Did the state lose a huge number of jobs? Did poverty increase dramatically? Why did the rate increase so much?
To me, it says something went really wrong with MN politics and policies during the T-Paw years.
What Mitt Romney Should Have Said - NYTimes.com // May 13, 2011 at 10:27 am
[...] the Bay State’s plunging uninsured rate, and even drawn contrasts to the records of some of his 2012 rivals. Indeed, this would have provided a natural introduction to his current roadmap for national health [...]
Will Pawlenty Defend His Health Care Record? | FrumForum | Health Insurance News // May 13, 2011 at 1:42 pm
[...] care record. But some of the other candidates have questions to answer as well.Read the full story here Previous Topic: Romney's Health Care 101 – CNN Political Ticker – CNN.com [...]
I stink at math, but by my calculations, that’s 12.9% growth in 5 years, or about 2.4% growth per year. Doing further calculations based on numbers I got from Wikipedia, Minnesota’s population growth in the past decade was about 0.75% per year. So the growth in the number of uninsured over population growth was about 1.65% per year. It seems to me that could be a statistical blip.
But a bigger problem for Frum’s question: he said that 2008 was the last year before the recession hit. In December 2008, the NBER said the recession had already begun in December 2007 (i.e., they were one year late in declaring the recession’s start). So we were already in the middle of a recession as of 2008.
And from when in 2008 are Frum’s numbers based? It would be significant if the numbers are as of June 1, 2008 as opposed to Jan 1, 2008 (i.e., well into the recession, less likely that you can fairly blame Pawlenty), but it would be a huge difference if the numbers are as of Dec 31, 2008 (four months after Lehman) than Jan 1, 2008 (i.e., no way you can blame Pawlenty). Without knowing the date from which the data is pulled, Frum’s data is meaningless.
So, the difference between insurance growth and population wasn’t that great. We already were in a recession as of the 2008 data point. And we might have been well into the steep part of the recession as of the 2008 data point.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Pawlenty has as little core and conviction as Romney, going from selling himself as a moderate, pragmatic, Sam’s Club politician to being a heel catering to the Tea Party, pathologically delusional, right-wing bunch. But I don’t think these numbers make for a powerful refutation of the Pawlenty candidacy. And Frum is usually more analytically astute than this (at least when he’s not defending the Iraq War).
But I don’t think these numbers make for a powerful refutation of the Pawlenty candidacy.
I don’t think DF is so much blaming Pawlenty for the rise in these numbers, but just asking, “When large sections of the population lose their health insurance en masse during tough economic times, do you think the government — federal, state, local, what have you — should do anything about it?”
Re: Tim Pawlenty’s health care record | The Daily Caller // May 16, 2011 at 9:58 am
[...] David Frum suggests a question for the next GOP debate: “Will Pawlenty defend his health care record?” [...]